Christopher Columbus: His Life and His Work. Charles Kendall Adams

wife. This, it is true, is negative evidence only, but it is quite enough to shake our confidence in the statement of Fernando. Of positive evidence there is none whatever. The first mention of his having been married at all occurs in a letter presently to be quoted; and the second was in the clause of his will providing for the saying of masses for his soul and for the souls of his father, mother, and wife. This document bears date of Aug. 25, 1505, and contains no mention of his wife’s name. A name first appears eighteen years later, in the will of Diego, who calls himself the son of Christopher Columbus and his wife Donna Philippa Moñiz. Elsewhere in the same will he refers to himself as the son of Felipa Muñiz, the wife of Columbus, whose ashes repose in the monastery of Carmen at Lisbon. It is possible that Moñiz, or Muñiz, was not the father’s name; but the giving of the maiden name alone in such a connection was not usual at that time, and therefore, in the absence of other evidence, it would seem improbable that the name given was the surname of the father. It was not until nearly fifty years later that the narrative of Fernando first mentions the name of Perestrello. Las Casas and other later writers have done nothing but copy the statement of Fernando, without further investigation. The matter would be of trifling significance but for the fact that later historians have magnified this supposed marriage into a matter of considerable professional importance. Las Casas tells us that he had learned from Diego Columbus that the Admiral and his wife lived for some time with the widow of Perestrello at Porto Santo, and that “all the papers, charts, journals, and maritime instruments” of the old navigators were placed at his disposal. But all the evidence of this fact now obtainable consists simply of repetitions of this statement. The most careful search of all the records has failed to discover a scrap of testimony that Columbus ever lived at Porto Santo or on any of the other islands off the coast of Africa. Harrisse has devoted more than thirty octavo pages to a very critical examination of all the evidence on the marriage of Columbus; but he is unable to reach any other positive conclusion than that very many of the early statements in regard to the matter cannot possibly be correct. As the result of his investigations, he inclines to the belief that the story of the Admiral’s living at Porto Santo and profiting by the maritime possessions and experiences of Perestrello must be abandoned. Beyond the fact that the Admiral’s wife bore the name of Philippa Moñiz, nothing on the subject can be regarded as absolutely known. It seems probable that Columbus was not married till after 1474; but the exact date cannot be established.

      As we shall not have occasion to refer to Columbus’s married life again, one fact more should here be noted. Fernando asserts that his father left Portugal in 1484 on account of the grief he experienced at the death of his wife. That the statement was incorrect, is shown by a letter, still in existence, in the handwriting of the Admiral himself. This letter, which was written to Donna Juanna de la Torre, a noble lady at the Spanish court, for the purpose of presenting his cause and arguing it with the evident expectation that his plea would reach the attention of the sovereigns, finally uses these words:—

      “I beg you to take into consideration all I have written, and how I came from afar to serve these princes—abandoning wife and children, whom for this reason I never afterward saw.”

       This lamentable recital, written sixteen years after Columbus left Portugal for Spain, and at least nine years after he presented himself with his son Diego at La Rabida, leaves upon our minds the inevitable inference that when he fled from Portugal in 1484, he left behind him a wife and at least two children. Of his legitimate offspring, his heir and successor Diego is the only one of whom any record has been preserved. As we shall hereafter have occasion to note, Columbus left Portugal, not only in poverty, but under circumstances which made it imprudent for him to return. We are obliged to infer that his wife and children were left in indigence. Neither in the numerous writings of Columbus nor in any of the records of the time is there any allusion to the death of the wife or of the children. No letter that passed between husband and wife has ever been found. It remains only to add, on the subject of his conjugal life, that Fernando, the historian, was the natural son of Columbus by a Spanish woman, Beatriz Enriquez by name, and was born on the 15th of August, 1488.

      Of the current life of Columbus at Lisbon we know very little. He seems to have been a skilful draughtsman and map-maker—at least, in one of his letters to the Spanish king he says that God had endowed him with “ingenuity and manual skill in designing spheres and inscribing upon them in the proper places cities, rivers and mountains, isles and ports.” Las Casas and Lopez de Gomera both assure us that Columbus made use of his skill as a means of livelihood.

       There is also evidence that he was engaged to some extent in commercial enterprise or speculation. In his will he ordered considerable sums paid to the heirs of certain noble and rich Genoese established in Lisbon in 1482—giving specific direction that they should not be informed from whom the money came. We know that he left Portugal secretly, and that the king, when inviting him to return, assured him immunity from civil and criminal prosecution. It has been plausibly conjectured that in the course of his commercial transactions he had incurred debts to his rich countrymen which he had never paid, and that at the last moment his conscience demanded absolution from these obligations.

      Though the occasion of such debts is purely hypothetical, it is not difficult to conjecture how they may have occurred. In the fifteenth century the commercial enterprise and opportunities of Lisbon attracted thither a large number of wealthy Florentine and Genoese merchants. We are informed that they were engaged in various commercial ventures; and nothing could be more natural than that they should be ready to avail themselves of the maritime skill of their young countryman. In the journal of Columbus, under the date of Dec. 21, 1492, he wrote:—

      “I have navigated the sea during twenty-three years, without noteworthy interruption; I have seen all the Levant and the Ponent; what is called the Northern Way—that is England; and I have sailed to Guinea.”

      As there is no other evidence that he went to England, it is probable that the allusion here is to that northern voyage, which, as we have already seen, had had the seas about Iceland as its destination. Though it is not easy to conjecture how the phrase, “twenty-three years without noteworthy interruption,” is to be reconciled with what we elsewhere learn of the years just before 1492, yet it is not difficult to understand how all the voyages referred to may have been made during that period. Before the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope by Bartholomew Diaz in December of 1487, the remotest navigable sea was not far away. To visit the North, the West, or the South was not an enterprise of long duration; and the mariner who had explored the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic from the equator to Iceland and the Baltic, might well claim to be familiar with all the seas that were navigable to a European.

      Such were the most important of the experiences, which, so far as we can now know, gave form and fibre to the character of Columbus. If the years were full of turbulent experiences, it is evident that they were also years full of absorbing thought.

      Soon after Columbus reached Lisbon, even if not before, he became possessed with the great idea that important discoveries could be made by sailing due west. Was the idea original with him? Was such a notion entertained by others? These questions, on which so much of the credit of Columbus depends, can only be answered after we take at least a brief survey of the geographical knowledge of the time.

      It will perhaps never be known who first propounded the theory of the sphericity of the earth; but we are certain that it was systematically taught by the Pythagoreans of southern Italy in the sixth century before Christ. With the writings of Pythagoras, Plato was familiar, and perhaps it was from this bold western speculator that the great Athenian philosopher received the impression that finally ripened into an unquestioning belief. Pythagoras believed the earth to be a sphere, and his views and theories are set forth in two of Plato’s works.

      But it was the great successor of Plato who was to have the credit of giving these views systematic form. In a treatise “On the Heavens” Aristotle gave a formal summary of the grounds leading to a belief in the earth’s sphericity.

      Greece bequeathed this doctrine to Rome, where it was specifically taught by Pliny and Hyginus, and was referred to with seeming approval by Cicero and Ovid. From the literature of Rome it passed into many of the school-books of the Middle Ages.

      The Greeks and Romans were fertile